This will be the new home for questions and responses addressed to (me and) John Polkinghorne.
As before, if you email nb_"at"_sciteb.com a question with Q4JCP in the subject I'll look at it and if it seems sensible respond. I aim then to send most of them to John to see if he has something to add, but have got rather behind on this. Your question (edited, including removing personal information) and the responses will then be posted here.

Sunday, 11 November 2012

Limits to the human brain, and how much science has been discovered?

Firstly, what is the confinements of the human brain, imagination. ie: is it possible to think of something that does not exist or is not related to something that exists? ie: if man creates something there are limitation to the creation.

If there are limitations to our imagination and we cannot think of something that does not “exist”, then the formulation of anything we imagine has to have a bases of existence and of realism.

Secondly, what percentage of “science” has man discovered, and how much is there still to be discovered? 5%, 10% of the whole understanding of science?

Response: Human brains are finite so there are clear limits to our thought. But we can certainly think of things that do not exist – and indeed could not exist.

I don’t think we can say what percentage of science is to be discovered: the more we know the more questions we can ask and, as we wrote in Questions of Truth science has a fractal character. What we have discovered is finite and what remains to be discovered is infinite so strictly speaking 0% of science has been discovered so far. But that’s not really very meaningful, and clearly some the things that remain to be discovered are less important than others. So to give a rough picture we might say something like “about 4.64% of science has been discovered” and hope people would get the mathematical joke about the cube root of 100.

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About Me

I'm webmaster of starcourse.org and polkinghorne.net.
IRL I'm a social philosopher/ strategy consultant, have 3 children and 5 grandchildren. Much of my thought on science and religion is outlined in my 2009 book "Questions of Truth" with John Polkinghorne.